One troubled Millennium village in Kenya

A project that the United Nations has spearheaded in an effort to meet the Millennium Development Goals is the Millennium Villages. Selected villages in Africa receive a lot of aid and effort, as the UN brings in technology and specialists to try to bring the entire village out of poverty.

The project has obtained some success as village residents are healthier and the children receive education. However, critics call it a waste of money and say it is impossible to replicate any success through the whole continent.

From this Associated Press article that we found at Google News, authors Jason Straziuso and Malkhadir Muhumed tell us more about one of the villages in Kenya.

About 70 percent of Dertu's people earn less than $1 a day, and most depend on food aid. The two-room hotel charges $1.25 a night. Generators and solar energy provide some basic needs, like charging cell phones, but the school's nine donated computers aren't yet connected to the Internet.

Not surprisingly, the advent of Millennium Village status four years ago generated exaggerated expectations, and now some villagers feel disappointed. There is also sharp debate between supporters and detractors about whether the idea can be "scaled up" into sweeping solutions for the world's poorest region.

Yet improvements can be seen in Dertu: four new health care workers, free medicines and vaccines, a birthing center and laboratory under construction, bed nets to ward of mosquitoes. In 2006, 49 percent of 916 individuals tested had malaria. That rate has dropped to 8 percent.

School attendance has doubled for boys and tripled for girls, there are high school scholarships and a dorm for boys. Each village gets $120 in spending per person per year, half from the villages project, the rest from the government or aid groups.

As a result, Dertu, which barely existed until UNICEF dug a well here 13 years ago, has become a magnet for surrounding villages.

"A lot has to be done still to meet the Millennium Development Goals. A lot has been done and for that we are thankful," said Ibrahim Ali Hassan, a 60-year-old village elder with dyed red hair who waves a cell phone in his hand as he talks.

Of the complainers, he remarks: "They think now that we are a Millennium Village they will be built a house with an ocean view."

Mohamed Ahmed Abdi, 58, heads the Millennium Village Committee, liaison between the project and the villagers. He gripes that there are too few teachers, and that the well water is salty and unhealthy.

"There is a difference between what we have been told and what really exists. We have been told that 'Your village is the Millennium Village.' We have been told that 'You will get roads, electricity, water and education,'" he said.

The Millennium Villages are the brainchild of Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist who is special adviser to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals.

Sachs readily acknowledges that Dertu hasn't made a breakthrough, calling it "one of the most difficult venues on the whole planet." But he points to other advances in lifting villages out of extreme poverty.

"I think on the whole they've been a tremendous success, not only in what they are accomplishing on the ground but also opening eyes to what can be accomplished more generally," Sachs told The Associated Press. "They're a proving ground of how to create effective systems in health, education, local infrastructure, business development and agriculture."

Madonna gives to children in Malawi

Pop music legend Madonna returned to Malawi to do some philanthropy. She presented a check to help build a school at one of the Millenium Villages in Malawi. This is also the country where her two adopted children come from, Madonna claims that Malawi is now her adopted home.

From Afrique En Linge, we read about the check presenting ceremony.

Madonna provided US$ 34,000 to build a primary school for 550 pupils and improve water supply and agriculture in the dusty Gumulira Village in Mchinji, some 120 kilometres west of the capital, Lilongwe.

The 'Millenium Village' also involves improvement of water supply and agriculture "to help villagers realise maximum profits from their toil," according to Prof. Jeffrey, the UN Secretary General's advisor on development issues, who designed the concept.

Apart from Sachs, Madonna was joined by Hans Vestberg, the CEO of global telecomms giant Ericsson. whose company is set to launch a new campaign for worldwide access to education using mobile technology on Tuesday in Malawi.

Madonna, who described Malawi as her adopted country, said she could not believe her ears when a friend of hers told her about levels of poverty in Malawi.

"Many people ask me why I chose Malawi; no, it is Malawi that chose me," she said. "As a mother it is really painful for me to see children deprived of opportunities because of poverty."

Madonna first visited the southern African country in 2006 during which visit she adopted her son, David Banda, now four. Last year she adopted her second Malawian daughter, Mercy Chifundo James, also now four.

Sachs on mobile technology at the Millennium Villages

In his latest commentary, Jeffrey Sachs highlights the great advances information and mobile technology have made in improving the lives of those in the under-developed world. In this piece that we found at Scientific American, Sachs cites a couple of examples that he found at the Millennium Villages.

On a recent trip to Africa, I saw two simple but powerful examples of lifesaving protocols enabled by mobile phones. In the Ghanaian village of Bonsaaso, part of the Millennium Village Project, a simple phone-based system is lowering maternal mortality during childbirth. Community health workers (CHWs) with basic training, a skilled midwife, an ambulance driver and a receiving hospital use mobile phones to coordinate as a team. Ever more deliveries now take place in the clinic rather than at home; in the event of complications, the mother is whisked to a receiving hospital about 10 miles away. Mobile phone connectivity among community, clinic, ambulance and hospital makes possible a once unthinkable degree of coordination.

In the Kenyan village of Sauri, also part of the Millennium Village Project, CHWs are pioneering the application of expert systems for malaria control. In the past, suspected malaria patients had to walk or be carried to a clinic, often miles away, have a blood smear read under a microscope by a trained technician and, if positive, receive a prescription. With clinics few and far between and with trained technicians and microscopes even scarcer, untreated, lethal malaria ran rampant.

In the new approach, CHWs visit households on the lookout for fevers that may signify malaria. They carry rapid diagnostic tests that examine a drop of blood for the presence of the malaria pathogen. Then they send an SMS (short service message) text with the patient’s ID and the test results. Seconds later an automated text response informs the health worker of the proper course of treatment, if any. The system can also send reminders about any follow-up treatments or scheduled clinic visits for the patient. The new system of malaria control includes insecticide-treated bed nets made to last for five years and a new generation of combination drugs based on a traditional Chinese herbal treatment, artemisinin.

This full set of tools constitutes a remarkably effective malaria-control system. Already a partial deployment of the system is reducing the malaria burden dramatically in several parts of Africa. Modest international financial support could greatly accelerate the deployment of the full system, and if it were scaled up throughout Africa, hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved annually at around $7 per person a year in the malaria-transmission zones.

Replicating the Millennium Villages success

The Millennium Villages are again the subject of story that weighs it's pros and cons. The Millennium Villages is a project from the United Nations and Dr. Jeffrey Sachs from Columbia University. A few villages were selected to see if a multi-faceted approach targeting health, education and jobs can pull people out of poverty rapidly.

The villages taking part in the Millennium Project are experiencing great success, but critics wonder if this can be replicated for every village around the world.

From the New York Times, writer Jeffery Gettleman describes life in one of the Millennium Villages; Sarui, Kenya.

Sauri was the first of what are now more than 80 Millennium Villages across Africa, a showcase project that was the dream child of Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Harvard-trained, Columbia University economist who runs with an A-list crowd: Bono, both Bills (Clinton and Gates), George Soros, Kofi Annan, Ban Ki-moon and others.

His intent was to show that tightly focused, technology-based and relatively straightforward programs on a number of fronts simultaneously — health care, education, job training — could rapidly lift people out of poverty.

In Sauri, at least, it seems to be working. Some of the goals were literally low-hanging fruit, like teaching banana farmers to rotate their crops. Other programs were more sophisticated, like the battle against malaria, which employs cutting-edge mobile technology against a disease that kills more than one million children each year.

The other day, a community health team in Sauri stooped through the doorway of a home of several sick children, said hello to Grandma and got to work. Within minutes, a health worker had pricked a child, sent a text message with the blood results by cellphone to a computer server overseen by a man named Dixon in a town about an hour away and gotten back these instructions: “Child 81665 OKOTH Patrick m/16m has MALARIA. Please provide 1 tab of Coartem (Act) twice a day for three days.”

These small miracles are happening every day now in Sauri, population 65,000. But the question for Mr. Sachs and his team remains: Is this progress, in development-speak, scalable? In other words, is there a way to take a place like this one and magnify the results by 1,000 times or 10,000 times and wipe out poverty across the developing world?
...

But there are Sachs detractors. One of the most dogged is William Easterly, a former World Bank economist and author of “The White Man’s Burden,” a book that critiques aid projects.

Mr. Easterly argues that the Millennium approach would not work on a bigger scale because if expanded, “it immediately runs into the problems we’ve all been talking about: corruption, bad leadership, ethnic politics.”
...

Mr. Easterly and others have criticized Mr. Sachs as not paying enough attention to bigger-picture issues like governance and corruption, which have stymied some of the best-intentioned and best-financed aid projects.

For example, one can easily picture what would happen in Kenya, where corruption is essentially a national pastime, if there were a free, donor-supported fertilizer program for the entire nation. The fertilizer would very likely never reach its intended target and would disappear like the national grain reserves that were plundered during a famine in 2008, or the billions of dollars of foreign aid that have ended up in the pockets of Kenyan politicians, according to numerous reports by human rights groups and financial auditors.

How the Millennium Villages got started

A very long profile of Jeffrey Sachs can be found in the Globe and Mail.

The article gives us a history of his work. One of the youngest to ever receive tenure at Harvard, Sachs was used by some governments in Europe to solve hyper-inflation and other economic problems. Since then, Sachs was called on by the United Nations to solve the problems of poverty.

For our snippet, writer Stephanie Nolen gives us the history of the Millenium Villages project.

The United Nations General Assembly had adopted a list of targets, the Millennium Development Goals, which aimed to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015. But it was clear by 2002 that many of the poorest countries, particularly in Africa, were not on track to meet the targets and, in many cases, were headed in the other direction.

That year, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed Prof. Sachs, then the director of a big-budget Columbia University think-tank called the Earth Institute, as his special adviser on the Millennium Goals, charged with drawing up a blueprint, complete with price tags, to meet them.

He delivered his plan in January, 2005. But he added a twist: He wanted to demonstrate, in his test-tube villages, that it could be done.

They started in Sauri because it had so many of the typical characteristics of extreme poverty. Two-thirds of its people were living on less than $1 a day, a quarter of them with HIV-AIDS, almost half infected with malaria parasites and half the children victims of chronic poor nutrition.

In addition, the community had some history of working with international organizations, which Prof. Sachs believed would remove several steps of groundwork.

In August, 2004, they met with the villagers, whom Prof. Sachs said were wildly enthusiastic. They also got a warm nod from the government of Kenya, which promised to support the project's infrastructure needs, with paved roads and an extended electrical grid. Medical advisers began testing everyone for malaria. The soil experts started analyzing samples.

Six months after Sauri, they went to Koraro in the desolate Ethiopian highlands. And now, the Millennium Villages Project is six months into setting up in Ghana, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda.

Each village is located in a distinct environmental zone. Some have farmers, some nomadic herders; some are chronically short of water, some in an equatorial fug. Each poses particular problems in terms of disease, agriculture and infrastructure.

These factors of geography help explain why so much of Africa remains terribly poor: Having endemic malaria all year long and being 15,000 kilometres from a railway line are huge issues, not just a local quirk.

Work has also begun on expanding the Sauri interventions to 10 surrounding villages, and in Malawi the plan has been rolled out to 13 villages around the original one. The goal is to cover 560,000 people by the end of this year.

"We're running because we think every country needs this push. And we're running because we're trying an interesting thought experiment — treating the Millennium Development Goals as real and not just a nice thing," Prof. Sachs said during a recent visit to Kenya.

"I'm kind of desperately rushing, hurrying everyone to the point of distraction, because I'm watching the clock — because every year lost is 10 million deaths. I can't believe we live in a world like that. I can't understand why it's not the biggest damn cause on the planet."

Jeffrey Sachs warns of red tape tying up the G-8 food security pledge

In his latest commentary, Jeffrey Sachs applauds the G-8 decision to put 20 billion dollars into agriculture.

A few years ago, research conducted by the UN's Millennium Project found that food production could dramatically increase if small, peasant farmers are given good seeds and fertilizer to grow with. So the G-8 pledge of money hopes to give more of these inputs to small farmers.

However, Sachs says that a lot could stand in the way of getting the inputs to the farmers. Sachs warns against the aid money being tied up in bureaucracies and red tape. We found his latest commentary at the Business World Online.

A consensus has now been reached on the need to assist smallholders, but obstacles remain. Perhaps the main risk is that the "aid bureaucracies" now trip over each other to try to get their hands on the $20 billion, so that much of it gets taken up by meetings, expert consultations, overhead, reports, and further meetings. "Partnerships" of donors can become an expensive end in themselves, merely delaying real action.

If donor governments really want results, they should take the money out of the hands of 30 or more separate aid bureaucracies and pool it in one or two places, the most logical being the World Bank in Washington and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in Rome. One or both of these agencies would then have an account with several billion dollars.

Governments in hunger-stricken regions, especially Africa, would then submit national action plans that would provide details on how they would use the donor funds to get high-yield seeds, fertilizer, irrigation, farm tools, storage silos, and local advice to impoverished farmers. An independent expert panel would review the national plans to verify their scientific and managerial coherence. Assuming that a plan passes muster, the money to support it would quickly be disbursed. Afterward, each national program would be monitored, audited, and evaluated.

This approach is straightforward, efficient, accountable, and scientifically sound. Two major recent success stories in aid have used this approach: the Global Alliance on Vaccines and Immunizations, which successfully gets immunizations to young children, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, which supports national action plans to battle these killer diseases. Both have saved millions of lives during the past decade, and have paved the way to a new more efficient and scientifically sound method of development assistance.

Not surprisingly, many UN agencies and aid agencies in rich countries fight this approach. All too often, the fight is about turf, rather than about the most effective way to speed help to the poor. Obama, Rudd, Zapatero, and other forward-thinking leaders can therefore make a huge difference by following up on their pledges at the G-8 and insisting that the aid really works. The bureaucracies must be bypassed to get help to where it is needed: in the soil tilled by the world’s poorest farm families.

Video: The Millennium Villages

This is a story from ABC News that aired in January.

Teach a man to fish a commentary

A director at the Earth Institute of Columbia University uses an old proverb in his latest commentary. Pedro Sanchez tells us how helping hungry people grow more food will do more than giving food, and it can be even cheaper.

The commentary is excerpted by the Guardian but will published in it's entirety in tomorrow's issue of Nature.

New evidence from the Millennium Villages project, which I direct, shows that helping farmers help themselves is more effective than food aid and costs a sixth as much. Farmers were given access to fertilisers, improved seeds, training and markets. Their maize yields more than doubled as a result. Similar results were seen in Malawi after its government provided fertiliser and seeds to farmers. In just two years, Malawi went from being a recipient of food aid to a food exporter.

It costs $812 to deliver one tonne of maize as US food aid to Africa. The fertiliser and seed that Millennium Village farmers need to produce an additional tonne of maize cost $135 on average.

Buying food aid locally, as the UN World Food Programme is increasingly doing, is another important step away from the inefficiency of food aid. Purchasing a tonne of maize in an African country costs approximately $320.

Although estimates on costs may vary, their underlying message is clear. Turning away from food aid and providing subsidies or credit to farmers in poor countries could help millions obtain their own food, begin the escape from poverty, and also meet much of the demand for food aid in developing countries – without costing more.

Fortunately, some donors are starting to shift away from food aid for the chronically hungry. The UN World Food Programme now buys some of its food aid in poor countries. The UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon is leading the development of a fund that would provide support for farmers in poor countries to grow more food. The Spanish government has pledged €1 billion over five years for this initiative, and the European parliament has committed the same amount. What is urgently needed now is an innovative financial mechanism that can deliver the funds rapidly and effectively to African governments that have shown a serious commitment to end hunger.

To paraphrase the popular proverb, giving someone a fish so they can "eat for a day" is only a solution for the most hungry who cannot help themselves or are the victims of war and famine. For most people in poor countries, we must give them the tools to fish so they can eat for a lifetime, and at one sixth of the cost.

It takes everyone to meet the MDG's, a perspective from Nigeria

With only 6 years left, there is a lot of concern over whether the Millennium Development Goals will be met by the target year of 2015. Many countries in the under developed world are not even half way to the goals.

In 2000, the United Nations and it's member states set up the MDG's in a declaration to try to cut human suffering. The goals were meant to halve poverty as well to find solutions to hunger, disease, gender equality, and education.

A story in All Africa has some optimistic views on meeting the MDG's in Nigeria. but the people interviewed say it needs everyone working to meet the goals. In his analysis, Murjanatu Mohammed Abba talked to coordinator of the Millennium Villages Project, Dr Tony Chevron.

In Kaduna, for instance, the programme coordinator of one of the millennium village projects in Africa, popularly known as Pampaida, Dr Tony Chevon, is still of the view that the MDGs can be attained with their kind of organizational plans.

He explained that there are14 of the millennium village projects and two of such projects are situated in Nigeria with one situated in Ikara Local Government Area of Kaduna Dtate and the other one in Akoko North-west Local Government Area of Ondo state.

Taking stock of the progress made by his office, Dr Chevon pointed out that," The purpose of the millennium village project is to eradicate poverty and also assist the rural people in attaining the MDGs and we have been here for about two and a half years and I think with the data we have, we have made milestones as far as some of the goals are concerned, especially the social-related goals like health, water and sanitation, education. I think we made tremendous progress in also the area of agriculture and livelihood".

He reiterated that the goals are achievable, noting that all it requires is concerted efforts by all stakeholders, principally comprising the local communities, local governments as well as the states and federal governments.

According to the programme coordinator, due to the success recorded by the millennium village programme, a lot of important personalities like members of the National Assembly, the Senate and many organizations have visited the project and have given very good remarks. Against that background, he said, the federal government is trying to buy and step up what they have in Pampaida into 111 local government areas across the country.

Preparatory to that, he added that his organization even had to invite some people from outside the country in an effort to achieve that noble objective.

Dr. Chevon, who argued that none of the MGDs are unattainable when all hands are not on deck, also appealed to people at the helm of affair to be transparent and accountable by using the federal government's MDGs intervention fund judiciously to serve the purpose for which it was released .

"We are aware that the federal government is using some funds gotten through the debt relief through the office of the special assistant to the president on the MDGs. And it is releasing a lot of money to the states and also releasing some money to NAPEP to ensure the MDGs are achieved. If such monies are spent by the people who receive such monies, then, there is no reason why Nigeria should not achieve these goals", he argued.

According to Dr.Chevon,"We also need to increase our communication awareness. It's sad that some people at some line ministries don't even know anything about the MDGs. It is not that they cannot know and be part of the process. Somebody has a role to tell the public, tell the people, even the civil servants, what the MDGs are, and how best we can work together to achieve them", he emphasized.

He envisaged: "Therefore, all the MDGs are achievable within the target year of 2015 if we put our hands together and are able to coordinate ourselves more properly. I don't see why we should not achieve these goals. Although we do have challenges, we don't keep a lot of records. So we need to orient ourselves in record keeping. A lot of money is also required to achieve the MDGs .Those saddled with the responsibilities should be transparent and accountable and should use these monies for the purpose for which it is released".

Giving to charity is much like investing

A great article today in the New York Times about charitable giving. It talks about George Soros $50 million gift to the Millennium Project. Some quotes are taken from Soros about his gift to the charity.

The article also provides some guidance to would be givers on how to choose a charity. Explaining that some research is needed much like you would research an investment. It reminded us that we should have one of these charity oversight groups on our "get Involved Links" so we will add Charity Navigator later today.

Our snippet from the Times article includes Soros explanation on why he thought the Millennium villages was a worthy charity.

Mr. Soros’s gift was for Millennium Villages, a project of Millennium Promise affecting a half-million people in Africa, where more than 80 villages are operating or are planned in 10 countries: Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda. Professor Sachs described the project as community-based development using a three-pronged approach — agriculture, health and education.

Asked why he had chosen Millennium Promise, Mr. Soros, a graduate of the London School of Economics, said, “Watching the Millennium efforts, I thought it was worth taking a risk.”

“My calculation in supporting this is as follows: $500 will move a family out of poverty,” he said. “As a pilot program, it will make a big difference in the pilot villages.” That is the first level of risk, he said, and it alone would justify the expenditure.

The second level of risk is leverage, or the hope that the villages will succeed in setting an example. “It can be a model for bringing about systemic change,” Mr. Soros said, and “if it can be scaled up, it will make a very big difference.”

Often pilot programs do not succeed on a larger scale, he added, but in this case he is hopeful. The government of Mali is very supportive, he said, so it could be expanded there.

Asked how he would advise prospective donors, Mr. Soros said they should “do as much research as possible. Looking at the expense issue is relevant but not decisive.” The humanitarian factor is vital. “There is no substitute for firsthand engagement,” he said.

The annual Jeffrey Sachs student lecture aimed at rich nations

Every year Jeffrey Sachs presents an annual lecture for the student body of Columbia University. Sachs is a professor at Columbia and directs the University's Earth Institute and it's Millennium Villages project. The villages are a sort of test lab for how to pull people out of poverty.

Jeffrey Sachs used this years student lecture to lament the fact that the rich nations are not hearing the cries of the poor, and the millions of people who stand up for them. He especially singled out the Bush administration.

The Columbia Spectator's Maureen Stimola reports that Sachs says that people in the Villages cannot escape poverty without aid.

Sachs stressed the need for more outside intervention. A major difficulty, he said, is the “poverty trap,” a phenomenon brought on by extended periods of extremely low productivity. Villagers often cannot escape the “trap” without aid.

But with five years of “investment, investment, investment, and community involvement with a holistic approach,” a base of economic productivity can form, he said. The following five years will be devoted to institutionalizing the project, and involving villages in business on a larger commercial scale.

Sach’s concerns come at a time when the project is entering what he calls a “critical, big-money phase.”

“Highly cost-effective solutions are abound,” Sachs said, “but the poorest of the poor can’t afford them, and the richest of the rich are often blind to them.”

Even so, the effects of the initial investments are already evident.

In the 12 existing Millennium Villages, locals have seen a rapid increase in agricultural productivity. Relatively low-cost bed nets have effectively stalled the spread of malaria. And with the advent of these successes, Sachs said they are arriving at the second phase of the project.

Sachs predicted that with more extensive “official aid” from economically successful nations, such as current sponsors Japan, Korea, and Norway, the project will be able to reach a level of self-sustainability.

Fighting Poverty, Village by Village

from The Morung Express

by Ernest Harsch

Standing in the midst of a freshly planted maize field, Bright Osei Kwaku recalls that last year he more than doubled his output with the help of improved seeds, fertilizer, and advice on farming techniques. Altogether, his two to three acres yielded about 15 100-kilogram bags of maize, compared with just six bags the year before, when he had no such support.

Many other young Ghanaians have either left agriculture or dream of doing so. But Kwaku, now 25 years old, thinks he can stay on the land. “I will continue to farm,” he told Africa Renewal. “I got income and food. I got enough from the farm.”
With world food prices rising, it is a good time to push for higher production, argues Isaac Kankam-Boadu, the agriculture and environment facilitator of the Millennium Villages Project in Bonsaaso, a cluster of poor and remote settlements in Ghana’s Ashanti Region. “The high food prices are an opportunity,” he says. “The farmers can earn more money.”

Last year, Kankam-Boadu reports, Bonsaaso’s maize farmers managed to quadruple their yields from an average of about one ton per hectare (two and a half acres) to four tons. Besides boosting their own incomes, the farmers contributed about a tenth of their crop to the area’s new school feeding program, which helps many of the area’s children.

Millennium Villages
Such linkages are at the heart of the Millennium Villages Project. The first Millennium Village was launched in 2004 in Sauri, Kenya, as an integrated development initiative. Besides Ghana, the project also soon expanded to include villages in Ethiopia, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda. The sites were selected on the basis of their poverty indicators and to represent Africa’s different ecological and climate zones. Altogether, more than 400,000 people now live in villages chosen for the project.

The idea grew from research and policy deliberations of the Millennium Task Force, directed by the United Nations secretary general’s special adviser on the Millennium Development Goals (M.D.G.’s), Jeffrey Sachs. The M.D.G.’s, adopted by world leaders in 2000, strive to reduce poverty and deprivation drastically around the world.
The Millennium Villages approach is based on two central ideas: The first is that simple and inexpensive changes in nutrition, health, water, sanitation, education, women’s status, agriculture, communications, roads, and electricity can lift rural Africans out of severe poverty. The second is that a combination of community mobilization, government support, and external aid can fund these efforts for only about $110 per person per year. Most of the Millennium Village projects are being implemented by the United Nations Development Program.

Initial funders included the government of Japan, which gave more than $9 million, and the United States-based financier and philanthropist George Soros, who gave $5 million. On 13 March, the Japanese government decided to extend its assistance by an additional $11.4 million.

Japan’s assistance to the project is part of that country’s wider program of support for Asia-Africa cooperation, known as the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (T.I.C.A.D.). The fourth conference was held in Yokohama, Japan, on 28–30 May, and was attended by Ghanaian President John Kufuor and nearly 40 other African heads of state. Near the top of T.I.C.A.D.’s agenda was achievement of the M.D.G.’s, which is also central to the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, Africa’s own blueprint for economic, social, and political progress.

From School Meals to Cell Phones
The Millennium initiative came to Bonsaaso in March 2006, initially in 10 localities. By the end of that year the project had expanded to 30 communities, covering some 400 square kilometers and affecting more than 30,000 people. The area was selected because many residents were very poor, malnutrition was common, there were few health services, many children did not go to school, and numerous other indicators of human development lagged. Rather than focusing on just one or two sectors, the project’s designers want to show that poverty can be attacked across a wide front. If successful here and in other countries, says Sam Asare Afram, the Millennium Village manager in Bonsaaso, the project could provide a “model” for the continent.

Although the project is only two years old, communities in Bonsaaso are already enjoying real results. Rita Adjei, head nurse at the health clinic in Watreso, says that the new anti-mosquito bed nets mean that fewer children get malaria, although diarrhea is still a serious problem caused by a lack of clean water and sanitation. She points to a bank of solar-powered chargers for cell phones, donated by Sony Ericsson. Once the Bonsaaso area comes under better cell phone coverage, Adjei and her assistant nurses will be able to obtain better information and advice quickly for their patients.

Nana Dapaah Siakwan, the traditional chief of Aboaboso, estimates that enrollment in the local primary school has increased from 200 to 500, largely thanks to the school feeding program that began in March 2007. There also is a new health clinic. Until it opened, seriously ill patients had to be carried many kilometers along forest paths to a distant clinic—on a tabletop, since there was no stretcher, explains the chief. Now, he adds, “We have seen the benefits.”

Mohammed Salifu, a cocoa farmer, produced nine 64-kilogram bags in 2007, up from just four the year before, simply by following the advice of an agricultural extension officer sent to Bonsaaso by the Ministry of Food and Agriculture. With new seedlings of a higher-yielding and faster-growing variety of cocoa, he hopes to do even better this year.

Bigger cocoa and food harvests will bring new challenges, however. The abysmal state of the roads within Bonsaaso and with other parts of Ghana makes it hard for farmers to get their crops to market. But Chinese road contractors hired by the government are busy at work, and the project has acquired two five-ton trucks to help transport produce. Developing physical infrastructure is not one of the M.D.G.’s, notes Ernest Mensah, a project facilitator. “But if you want to eradicate poverty,” he adds, “you need infrastructure.”

Avoiding Dependency
Critics of donor-aided development projects in Africa point out that they often tend to make the beneficiaries dependent on outside assistance, and frequently collapse if that money eventually dries up. The Millennium Villages Project does rely on significant inflows. On average, about 60 percent of project financing comes from donors, 30 percent from national and local governments, and the rest from the communities themselves.

In part, the project is designed to convince donors to provide more financing over the long term, by demonstrating concretely that aid can be used effectively to reduce poverty. A careful tally is kept of every dollar spent in Bonsaaso and other Millennium Villages, not only to avoid waste and inefficiency, but also to demonstrate to donor governments that simple interventions can make a real impact. “They don’t know how practical the solutions are,” says Sachs, referring to donor agencies. “They don’t realize that at very low cost—just a few dollars—you can save children’s lives.”

By showing that external aid can indeed be effective in Africa, Sachs and his colleagues hope to convince the major industrialized countries to live up to their commitments. The 2005 summit meeting of the Group of Eight industrialized countries, for example, pledged to provide Africa with about $50 billion in aid annually by 2010—still about twice what donors are giving so far.

To help guard against local expectations that such outside assistance will continue to keep the Millennium Villages functioning, project planners stress that certain forms of aid will be steadily reduced and that governments and villagers will need to take up a greater share of the cost. The new higher-yielding cocoa seedlings provided to farmers are currently subsidized, notes Kankam-Boadu. But as farmers earn more from their cocoa sales, by next year the subsidies will begin declining, “to let them know the realities of the market.”

Similarly, health care in Bonsaaso’s new clinics is free for the time being, to encourage poor villagers to use their services. But, explains Afram, free care is not sustainable over the long term. Project workers therefore are helping villagers sign up for Ghana’s national health insurance scheme.

In various ways, project organizers are encouraging national and local government bodies to expand their presence in Bonsaaso: by building roads, extending electricity connections, and sending in more teachers, health care workers, and agricultural extension advisers.

Link to full article. May expire in future.

Malawi Rural Dwellers Benefit from Millennium Villages

from Voice of America

An update on the experimental Millennium villages Project. While this profiles Malawi there also such villages in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda. - Kale

By Lameck Masina

In Malawi, two villages with about 40,000 people have begun reaping the fruits of the United Nations initiative known as the Millennium Villages project. The goal is to reverse the poverty, hunger and disease affecting millions of rural people in sub-Saharan Africa. Voice of America English to Africa Service's Lameck Masina in Blantyre reports that there are two Millennium Villages in Malawi – one in the southern district of Zomba, the other in the central district of Mchinji.

UN specialists have been helping the villagers improve education, health care and small businesses. For example, 30 thousand bed nets have been distributed to households to combat malaria, and nearly 40 boreholes have been drilled to provide access to clean water.

School children in the two Millennium Villages receive corn porridge in an effort that teachers say has almost doubled attendance in primary schools.

Much of the emphasis has been on improving food production. UN specialists in the villages have been emphasizing improved seeds and fertilizers in order to maximize crop production. Farmers are encouraged to create their own fertilizers from manure, because the cost of commercial fertilizers has more than doubled since last year.

Farmers are also encouraged to grow a diverse array of cash crops, including groundnuts, cabbages and tomatoes.

Vailet Mawerenga, a farmer in the Millennium Village in Zomba, says "Before I joined the project, the main problem I was facing was an acute maize shortage, but now food is not a problem, [especially] to those who are working hard."

Mawerenga says in the past she used traditional seed varieties, which produced about four 50kg bags of maize per acre. Today, new hybrid seeds have given her a 10-fold increase.
She says this year is her best yet. Her first priority, she says, is to replace the thatched roof of her house with a metal one. If crop surpluses continue, she wants to open a tailoring shop.

Farmers in Zomba say the rising cost of fuel is the main factor cutting into their profits from increased production. As a result, some farmers have to cycle 25km to sell produce at the nearest town. Others have joined forces to hire pick-up trucks to take their crops to the main market.

Phelire Nkhoma, the agriculture coordinator for both of Malawi's Millennium Villages, says "What we have discovered is that the project has really transformed the lives of these people. We have seen our farmers…with food [now] throughout the season and [with] good houses with iron-sheeted roofs. The cases of malnutrition care are no longer there."

The Millennium Villages were inspired by Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. They were commissioned by the UN secretary general as a way to help achieve the organization's Millenium Development Goals, which focus largely on cutting poverty in half in Africa by 2015.

Financial support for the Malawi villages is scheduled to end in five years. But Nkhoma says the success of the villages may change that, "We are expecting that in 2010 the Millennium Villages project will [end]. However there are some rumors that probably it can extended to another five years."

Link to full article. May expire in future.

No poverty in Africa by 2015; Is it achievable?

from Joy Online

A GNA feature by Hannah Asomaning

Imagine a world where there is no poverty, there is basic education for everybody, respect for human rights, equal rights and opportunities for men and women and all the goodies one can wish for.

There would be no crime, pain, hunger and anguish as seen in some parts of the world today. It would really be a pleasant place to live in.

The United Nations perhaps imagined these when it came up with the Millennium Development Goals to be achieved by 2015.

The Millennium Development Goals for 2015 were designed in 2000 by the United Nations and signed by 189 countries and all other member states of the European Union.

Almost half-way through the timeframe, we are unfortunately nowhere near the envisioned results: halving extreme poverty and hunger; basic education for all children; halving child mortality and deaths at child birth; a halt to AIDS and malaria; a cleaner environment that is having safe drinking water for all but especially also the development of an open, fair, non-discriminatory trade and financial system.

The last goal empowers developing countries to contribute by their own economic strength to all the other goals.

Economists say Ghana should attract sustainable private investments needed to accelerate economic growth and lift millions of citizens out of poverty.

He noted that one out of three Ghanaians still live below the poverty line.

Ghana may even be better economically compared with some countries in Africa where there is mass poverty, hunger, high maternal mortality and disrespect for human rights, resulting in wars and other problems.

Africa has been described as a scar on the surface of the earth and there have been numerous problems in Asia like tsunamis, flood, poverty and hunger.

What can be done to solve this problem and help the world achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015?

Mr John Prescott, Deputy British Prime Minister, noted that the world was now focusing on how to help Africa tackle her problems.

"Africa is of course a place of great beauty, fantastic diversity, resilient and talented people with enormous potential," he said.

"It is the only continent getting poorer and where in many places life expectancy is falling," he added.

Mr Prescott said agreements had been reached to double aid to Africa by 2010, to write off debts of the poorest countries and to increase funding massively to tackle AIDS and improve health care and education.

"Britain is planning to spend over 8.5 billion Pounds sterling over the next 10 years supporting long-term education plans in poor countries," he said, and called on rich countries to follow so that by 2015 children everywhere would be able to complete at least five years of quality education.

"We look forward to realizing the huge potential of a new Africa in which every person can one day be free from injustice, poverty and disease."

Apart from Britain, there are governmental and non-governmental organizations in Europe equally working to help the United Nations achieve the MGDs.

The Netherlands is one such European country that focuses on working together with developing countries to see how best to achieve the MDGs by 2015.

An organization, "The Third Chamber", known in Dutch as "Dederdekamer", is one such organization that refuses to accept poverty in all forms and work with representatives from developing countries to know their problems and discuss possible ways of solving them.

The Third Chamber, for instance, makes public support for international development visible to relevant politicians in addition to making the voice of developing countries heard in political and public debates in the Netherlands.

The Third Chamber is an initiative of the Netherlands National Commission for International and Sustainable Development (NCDO) in-charge of raising awareness and distribution of information about co-operation.

Concerned members of The Third Chamber 2007 are urgently requesting, for instance, the phasing out of export subsidies for farmers in the developed countries so that developing countries could support their own farmers' harvests sold at reasonable prices to the people.

With imported poultry products being cheaper than what is produced in Ghana, because of subsidies by various countries, the public prefers to buy imported frozen chicken.

In the Netherlands, a document called the Coalition Agreement is used as a guide for the ruling government.

In the current Coalition Agreement for the new Dutch government the ambition to abolish export subsidies is surprisingly missing even though all three coalition parties - The Christian Democratic Party (CDA), PvdA (Labour Party) and Christenunie - had it on their respective electoral platforms.

Members of The Third Chamber find the absence curious and a great deficiency and are calling on the parties to put this into government policy.

The NCDO also works through the various Netherlands embassies in developing countries to give development aids to the people.

Africans need to be effectively involved and concerned about their own development by working hard to ensure that poverty eradication is achieved. There must also be promotion and respect for human rights and change of attitudes towards achieving the MDGs by 2015.

Ghana has been dubbed: "Gateway to Africa" so the attainment of 50 years of independence has been tagged by many people as "Africa's 50th independence anniversary".

It is no wonder that at 50 years, Ghana's President is the Chairman of African Union since Kwame Nkrumah declared that: "The independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked with the total liberation of Africa."

There is no country in Africa which is still a colony of a developed world but is Africa emancipated? Are we economically independent? The questions can roll on and on.

The United Nations and the European Union are now focusing on how to help Africa out of poverty and other problems.

The Millennium Development Goals are achievable if we contribute our quota as individuals, nations and the world.

UN Advisor Sees Progress In Reaching Goals To End Poverty

from Nasdaq

The top U.N. advisor pressing for countries to meet U.N. targets for poverty reduction by 2015 said Wednesday there was reason for optimism that the world was inching closer to meeting them.

Jeffery Sachs, director of the U.N. Millennium Project, reported "notable progress" in introducing programs needed to end poverty and hunger.

But he was not prepared to predict whether the goals will be met.

"We'll know it when we don't make it, or we'll know it when we do make it," he told a news conference.

Looking back on the goals adopted by world leaders in September 2000 to promote development and health care in the world's poorest countries, Sachs said that despite slow progress, the year could be ended on a note of optimism.

"There has been notable progress, in my view, in thinking about how to make progress in these goals" by coming up with "practical steps that can be taken," Sachs said.

He cited the example of a summit on malaria hosted at the White House last week by U.S. President George W. Bush.

Sachs said such programs promote the fact that deaths from malaria can be prevented.

Because of such programs, he said he expects to see malaria "under control by 2010."

Still, few references to the specific goals are made in Washington, he said, adding that the mention of the millennium development goals, known as MDGs, keeps attention on the issues they address. The ambitious goals for 2015 include fighting poverty,promoting universal primary education and gender equality, reducing child mortality, combating HIV/AIDS and malaria, ensuring environmental sustainability and providing clean water and sanitation.

"These goals are not our normal kinds of goals, these are life and death goals," Sachs said.

Despite the gains achieved, overall progress in reaching the goals has been too slow, he said.

Sachs has served as the director of the U.N. Millennium Project, commissioned by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in 2002 to develop an action plan for the world to achieve the goals. He is also the director of The Earth Institute at Columbia, which promotes sustainable development and approaches to meeting the needs of world's poor.

Sachs will continue serving as special adviser on MDGs to the U.N. Development Programme, which coordinates poverty reduction programs in developing countries.